I’ve just spent the last few days at home on reading week (It’s called that because that’s the last thing you want to do yet the first thing that you should do on spring break.) It hasn’t been a much of a week as far as getting thing done. I’ve spent the first few days chasing the karmic tail. First, I decided not to bring home my ReadyBoost USB for Vista as I anticipated using XP or Linux. I was mostly exited about my Fedora 10 installation because I haven’t used it much. 5 days max. And I wanted to use a 64 bit OS. By the time I think about it now, I can’t tell if Fedora was faster than XP or Vista, but I do remember it crashing in Gnome with Compiz and KDE4 with its effects. It’s official. Anything on Google’s official (at least as soon as you find out). Everything else don’t make a difference. (Actually, everything else worked fine in Fedora except…) I’ve been an old Sabayon user (more on that later), and I trust it a lot more than some pet project of Red Hat that charges money for the better bug fixed Red Hat Enterprise and sabotages the most innovative Linux projects to crush competition (more on that again, but here’s a hint just to remind myself). Yeah, so I have been chasing the garbage tail (er… a tail of garbage?) since I got opinionated about the OS I use. There’s even a great divide between XP users and Vista lovers (not to say anything about my dad’s preference to keep 2000 on an old machine). It’s all garbage. I mean the garbage code in PLT Scheme! If it wasn’t for that and a slight problem with suspend that I’ve just figured out from Google, I’d still be using Sabayon. But as the story goes, it started this way:
XP -> Sabayon -> Dark XP -> ____ -> Sabayon -> XP -> Sabayon -> Vista -> Sabayon -> Kubuntu -> Vista -> Sabayon -> Kubuntu (next time)
Ah, good thing I kept an album of my old desktops on facebook.
In the beginning was the command line. Now days, the windows command line has become more advanced as the power shell and the Linux command line ix just more versatile. As far as Linux being GNU and free goes, GNU doesn’t stand for great software and free doesn’t mean freedom. Who would want to spend their time looking around on the Internet to get suspend or hibernate working when it already works? Who would want to invest time and effort into a system that is not guaranteed to satisfy all your needs?
From a moral point of view, Linux makes logical sense, it appeals to reason. Whatever marketing Windows does, it cannot beat the simple message Linux delivers, that it is free and by osmosis, the user is free, too. That is obviously a false assumption. Yes, Linux offers the chance, given the choice, to modify source code. But the choice is not there in the first place. I’ve actually never modified source code yet, and as for compiling, I end up wasting more time on it than I can save. For example, Dr Scheme compiled in Gentoo simply hangs where it doesn’t. As for great software, I think Enterprise Linux might be better than Windows due to the bug fixes and support. I’d rather be free as in having free time, free in my non-obligation to the community, and free as in not having a bag of thoughts surrounding how I should use my computer. These days, I have too much clutter in my head.
Here’s a quote that I think is an appropriate description of a proper relationship to the computer: “Few things about your PC are as boring as things that just work, invisible in the background. ” To a large extent, Linux fits the boring category because it just works. When it doesn’t a few minutes on Google will solve it. On the other hand, Microsoft takes the other end. It gives gamers the best graphics, the desktop never crashes, and there’s a GUI to control everything. It doesn’t makes the PC anymore fun (to a large extent, trying to have fun on Windows often meant wasting time), but it won’t crash the OS. Compared to Linux, my fun using it comes largely from experimentation and getting hardware to work. The first part often crashes the desktop and the latter often takes hours to get done what only takes 5 minutes with the limited options in Windows. Having limited options in the OS does save me time making decisions and trying this or that as in Linux.